Kathleen Booth
In the late '40s, British mathematician and programmer Kathleen Booth wrote the first assembly language for a computing system called ARC (Automatic Relay Calculator). ARC’s assembly language directly corresponded with machine code1. Kathleen was ahead of her time, researching neural networks and natural language processing in the '50s. Read More
Grace Hopper
An iconic American computer scientist and United States Navy Admiral, Grace Hopper developed FLOW-MATIC, one of the first data-processing languages. FLOW-MATIC ran on the UNIVAC, using English-like statements to solve data problems. Grace aimed to make working with computers accessible to the average person1. Read More
Jean E. Sammet
(March 23, 1928 – May 20, 2017) was an American computer scientist who developed the FORMAC programming language in 1962. She was also one of the developers of the influential COBOL programming language. Sammet founded the ACM Special Interest Committee on Symbolic and Algebraic Manipulation (SICSAM) in 1965 and was chair of the Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN). She was the first female president of the ACM, from 1974 to 1976. 1976. Read More
Barbara Liskov
The invention of CLU was an evolutionary step towards object-oriented programming languages. The development of CLU was led by Barbara Liskov at MIT. Liskov was the first woman in the US to be awarded PhD in computer science. She later introduced concepts like abstract data types, iterators, and parallel assignment. Even though the language lacked key OO features, it influenced well-known modern languages like Java, Python, and C++. Read More
Quotes and Insights✨
“Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.' I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise.” — Grace Hopper
“Data abstractions provide the same benefits as procedures, but for data. Recall that the main idea is to separate what an abstraction is from how it is implemented so that implementations of the same abstraction can be substituted freely.” — Barbara Liskov
“A ship in port is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.” — Grace Hopper
“If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It is much easier to apologise than it is to get permission.” — Grace Hopper